Professor's book garners awards

Bill Meissner is earning critical praise for his novel about a baseball player who discovers a Native American burial ground beneath a ball field he's building.

"Spirits in the Grass," a University of Notre Dame Press title, won a Midwest Book Award in the general fiction category from the Midwest Independent Publishers Association. Learn more at undpress.nd.edu.

Forward Magazine, a Michigan bimonthly that reviews titles from independent publishers, named the novel a finalist in its general fiction category.

Midwest Booksellers Association declared it a Midwest Favorite.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune said: "Meissner pulls together threads of race, romance and mystery in this novel about middle age, choices and change."

Wrote a reviewer in Booklist, the magazine of the American Library Association:

“Novels about baseball or small-town life often fall prey to a too-easy sentimentality and a tendency toward soft-focus prose. Meissner tackles both these topics but, remarkably, avoids both flaws. . . . [He] handles all his story lines — the centerfielder manqué, the ‘spirits in the grass,’ the troubled romance, the fight with city hall — with admirable subtlety, sidestepping the multiple clichés that can so easily attach themselves to all of these themes. This is a quiet novel but an emotionally powerful one, rich with ambiguity and with the scent of felt life.”

PEN/Hemingway prize-winner Susan Power, a Hamline University professor of Lakota ancestry, said: “His words are supple as grass, his language a graceful dance that is a pure joy to read.”